Email Marketer’s Guide to Captivating Email Design
Your email campaign is losing customers and you don’t know what to do. You’ve tried so many things, but nothing seems to be gaining traction.
With so much regular exposure to so much information, you need to understand that people are always looking for something different.
Something special.
So why would they want to spend their precious time reading boring, ugly, dated emails? They wouldn’t. Don’t be just another generic voice shouting into the email marketing abyss.
Orchestrating and implementing a successful email marketing campaign requires more than just an understanding of market behaviors, bounce rates, and increased engagement. While it is absolutely vital to dial in on these things, there is still much more to consider.
Email design is an essential component for executing a well-rounded, effective, engaging campaign.
By harnessing your team’s creative resources, and not shying away from doing some experimentation, you will be offering your audiences what they need most: something unique and, you guessed it, special.
So, where to begin? How can you establish a campaign that is efficient, interesting, reliable, and has aesthetic appeal?
This article will help shed light on the process, so read on!
Trends vs. Fundamentals
Design trends come and go in all kinds of industries. Inevitably, the excellent ones will cycle back, oftentimes with slight modifications, while many others will be sent to the scrap heap.
Whether it be in fashion, the automotive industry, toys, consumer packaged goods, video games, or countless other media, it is important to experiment with trends while understanding fundamentals.
The phrase “you have to know the rules before you can break them” comes to mind. Email design is no exception.
There are many reliable go-to fundamentals when it comes to email marketing, and some best practices you should study if you are new to this. You can also use them as a quick refresher if you’re a marketing veteran.
But what you consider “fundamental” one day may be considered unusable in fairly short order.
Forecasting what will work in six months or two years, or even sometimes just a few weeks can be a tall task for any department. You have to try and be as agile as possible when it comes to email design!
Trends serve as a reminder that pushing boundaries and incorporating emerging technologies into your design campaign can yield very real results when it comes to audience engagement.
Not to mention that timely, calculated implementation of a viable trend can set you apart from your competition in a cost-effective way.
Too Much of a Good Thing
Whether you are a freelance contractor or have a team of marketers reporting to you, you need to ease into new technology so that you don’t get ahead of yourself or stunt the momentum your business may be having.
If your team isn’t on the same page, your product will suffer, and no amount of trendy technology will help that.
Your audiences shouldn’t ever feel overwhelmed by your flashy new design tools, either. Be responsibly risky and the results will come.
The main point here is that neither trends nor fundamentals can exist without the other. If a big-box retailer can simultaneously stock virtual reality headsets and wooden blocks, then you can and should use a balanced, common-sense approach to your email design.
Keeping an Eye on the Other Guys
Like with any aspect of email marketing (or business in general), you have got to keep tabs on other players in your industry. Along with the more technical aspects of conducting this competitive analysis, it behooves you to pay attention to their design schemes, as well.
Questions to consider include:
- Which trends are they incorporating into their campaigns?
- Are they hitting important fundamentals?
- What font(s) do they use and where?
- How do they structure their subject lines?
- Do they use emojis?
- What’s different with this week’s email from last week’s?
- How does the overall design reflect the brand theme?
Work hard to compile information about your competitors’ design methodologies and measure it against your own campaign’s efforts. Pay attention to scheduling patterns and delivery frequency, as well.
Frankly, audiences are tired of being spammed and will unsubscribe in a heartbeat if they feel that you are overloading their inboxes.
Keep tabs on industry newcomers, as well. It is just as important to learn from them as it is to learn from established competitors.
Email Design Should Be Personal
As stated earlier in the article, audiences are always on the lookout for something special and unique. The number one reason they crave that is that they themselves are special and unique.
One-size-fits-all is no longer an effective approach when it comes to email marketing. Gathering specific information about your audience members will help you segment your audience and personalize your messaging.
Audiences want to feel seen and heard and can smell a generic email from miles away. The more you learn about your audience, the more you can make them feel special.
Think about those people in your life who make you feel special. What do they do for you and with you that makes it so? They learn about your interests, your hobbies, your dislikes, and what motivates you. They take the time to understand how you tick.
You need to do the same with your audiences. Take time to learn as much as you can about them.
What drives their decision-making? What turns them off to a brand?
The more you are able to cater emails to specific segments, the better off your campaign will be, and you can keep building on that information as you move forward with new campaigns and projects.
Surveys are a great way to find out about your audiences and to gather information about where you might need to improve as a business. It’s a win-win…if you do it correctly.
This article expands on these points to give you a great breakdown of dynamic email marketing, reinforcing the importance of getting as granular as possible when it comes to email design.
Email Design Is a Science and an Art
Not to get too philosophical here, but it bears reminding that even something as seemingly simple as an email is an opportunity to showcase your brand’s creativity. Marketing is a game of analytics and artistry.
Seize that opportunity! Perhaps you have an old drawing laying around of the first iteration of your hot sauce company’s brand logo and you bring it to life with a short stop-motion video. Perhaps you launch a campaign to collaborate with amateur artists to help you design something new that you can use for future emails!
Maybe you’ve wanted to write a video script for one of your clients but never had the chance to. If you want your campaigns to succeed, you must always be thinking outside the box.
Now is not the time to be shy.
Leveraging the nexus of art and science is one of the things that makes this industry especially challenging.
Your Client’s Industry Isn’t “Exciting” Enough
This can be a huge hurdle for some of you. How on earth do you make air duct repair cool and interesting? Or what if the subject matter of the campaign is more serious, like a life-threatening medical condition?
While it may be tougher to ratchet up the fun factor in some industries, there are strategies that exist to help liven up any industry.
Use humor. Use short videos. Collaborate with adjacent industries, and maybe even some competitors, to come up with something your customers haven’t seen before.
It can absolutely be done!
Designing your email campaign with some levity and/or cleverness can go a long way (so long as it is appropriate, of course). Audiences are looking for a lot from the brands they trust.
Keeping things light is a great way to help establish that trust.
Which Template Works Best For You?
Depending on your specific needs and the kind of aesthetic appeal you are going for, there is a template out there for you.
There are dozens of template providers available out there including Mailchimp, Moosend, and Mosaico. Do your due diligence to discover which one is right for you.
You’re an Email Design Guru Now
Do you feel that adrenaline coursing through your veins? Do you feel more alive than you’ve ever felt, ready to take the email design bull by the horns?
We sure hope so! EmailOversight is committed to making your email marketing campaigns stand out and give you the best possible chance to succeed in a tough industry.
So join us today to receive access to a whole host of tools and resources you’ll need to bring your email marketing game to the next level, and happy marketing!
